Re: Windows experiences [was: Re: Cfengine sources]

[Alexander Mattausch]

Christian Pearce schrieb:

> That's ugly.  Can you elaborate?  I have heard of people using cfengine for 
> managing windows desktops.  Can people share their experiences?
>  
I am administering some Windows machines, but do not use cfengine for it.
The replace-open-files-issue is ugly, but it's not such an important 
point. (BTW, there are some backup tools that allow access to open files 
-- but I don't know how they do that. There must be some way to bypass 
the locking mechanism.) Most services use registry entries, also most of 
the Windows configuration is done by registry hacks. Something like a 
"registry"-section in cfengine would help here, at least for simple 
networks and as a first step. For larger networks, this may interfere 
with system and group policies. Also support of the WMI-API would be 
nice (these functions can also edit the registry, but are not compatible 
with NT 4 and below). Without that, cfengine is mainly helpful for 
copying files -- but I rarely need that. I would be interested in 
keeping registry values in sync (I currently do that using system 
policies, which are, however, very ugly to define if you do not have 
preconfigured ADM-files for the policy editor).

Regards,
Alex Mattausch